Hours before the start of the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur, an estimated 1,500 Israelis came together in gatherings all across the country to pray for the people in Syria.Coordinated through a Facebook event, Israelis joined hands in prayer, music, and silent meditation in places such as Beersheba, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and the Golan Heights. They were united under the banner “The world is silent, we are not”.
“Hundreds of people, men, women and children, are slaughtered daily and the world is silent,” event organizer Shivi Froman, son of the late peace activist Rabbi Menachem Froman, told Walla News. He said that the pre-Yom Kippur grouping was “to cry out, to pray, to hope, to sing, to identify and to awaken the mercy of the world in general and about the suffering that is taking place here next to us.”
Froman also said the massacre in Syria gives him “deja-vu of the world’s silence about the Holocaust.”
Earlier this year the Israeli government authorized the delivery of humanitarian aid to Syrians in need through the nations’ shared border. More than 2,000 Syrians have been treated in Israeli hospitals since 2013, even though the two countries have been in a state of war since Israel’s founding. Israeli journalist Ron Ben-Yishai documented one of the risky missions the IDF undertook to rescue an injured Syrian fighter last year. Pregnant women sometimes travel to the border in order to deliver their babies in Israel, and two years ago Israeli doctors treateda young Syrian girl whose leg was shattered with a cutting-edge procedure that allowed her to walk again.
Aboud Dandachi, a Syrian refugee, has set up a website, Thank You Am Israel, to say “Thank you to the people of Israel and the Jewish people the world over, for showing kindness and charity to Syrians, whether it is through your IDF medical teams, your aid workers in Greece and the Balkans, or your congregations in North America raising money to aid and sponsor Syrian refugees.”

A member of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas was indicted on Tuesday for plotting to carry out a suicide bombing on a Jerusalem bus. Muhammad Fuaz Ibrahim Julani, a 22-year-old Palestinian resident of eastern Jerusalem, was arrested by the Shin Bet last month. Julani planned to carry out a suicide bombing on a bus in the Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood of Jerusalem and was in touch with Hamas handlers based in the Gaza Strip via the Internet. He landed on the bus bombing after considering other options, including “a shooting attack with an AK-47 assault rifle near the Hizme checkpoint; bombing a store where he had worked in 2011; throwing an improvised explosive device at the checkpoint in Shuafat; and pipe bomb attacks in high-traffic locations of Jerusalem, like the bus station and the Malha shopping mall,” The Times of Israel reported.
His Hamas contacts helped him plan the bombing and encouraged him to recruit accomplices. The Shin Bet said in a statement, “This investigation reiterates and highlights the unrelenting effort by Hamas operatives in the Gaza Strip to instigate severe terror attacks in Israel and the West Bank.”
Julani had successfully gathered the materials that he needed to make the bomb for the attack, and it was the second time he had done so: the first time, the materials had been discovered by his parents and he “begged for forgiveness from his father and threw out the materials he had purchased.” Julani told the Shin Bet that he had planned to carry out a stabbing attack last year, also in Pisgat Ze’ev, but decided against it out of fear that his family’s house would be demolished. (Israeli authorities demolish the houses of Palestinian terrorists in order to provide a financial disincentive for killing Israelis, which the Palestinian Authority rewardswith salaries.)
Shortly after a Palestinian terrorist killed two Israelis and wounded six others during a shooting spree in Jerusalem on Sunday, Hamas claimed the attacker as one of its own and calledon its operatives in the West Bank to prepare “for a new phase of confrontation.”

The United Nations has never recognized a Jewish holiday—until now.No formal meetings will be held at its headquarters in New York on Wednesday out of respect for Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Credit is attributed to a tireless campaign by Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations Ron Prosor, who helped pass the decision last December, despite ongoing opposition and threats by other diplomats to forfeit goodwill.
Current United Nations envoy Danny Danon has also pushed for more Jewish inclusion. He wore a skullcap during his first speech in the Security Council, organized a Hannukah party, took 70 foreign diplomats to see “Fiddler on the Roof” on Broadway on Israeli Independence Day, and organized a Passover Seder. “We had more than 40 ambassadors sit down for three hours — that’s very impressive,” said Danon. He is now asking the UN to provide kosher food options in its cafeterias.